Advocates Shun ‘Pro-Choice’ to Expand Message

WASHINGTON — For all the talk about women’s issues in this year’s midterm election campaigns, something is missing. One of the most enduring labels of modern politics — pro-choice — has fallen from favor, a victim of changed times and generational preferences.

That shift might seem surprising in this political season, when there has been a renewed focus on reproductive issues like access to abortion and birth control. Yet advocates say that the term pro-choice, which has for so long been closely identified with abortion, does not reflect the range of women’s health and economic issues now being debated.

Nor, they add, does it speak to a new generation of young women, who tell pollsters that they reject political labels — not least one that dates back four decades, to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that established a constitutional right to abortion.

“The labels we’ve always used about pro-choice and pro-life — they’re outdated and they don’t mean anything,” said Janet Colm, 62, president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund of Central North Carolina, as she prepared to take several younger women to a summer protest at the legislature in Raleigh. “I used to be a one-issue voter” — pro-choice — “but I think most younger people today aren’t.”

No pithy phrase has replaced pro-choice. Activists talk mainly of “women’s health” and “economic security,” usually with policy specifics.

Anti-abortion activists have noticed that their opponents have all but stopped saying pro-choice, and they count that as a victory.

“I find it very encouraging that they find that after 40 years they have to do something different because they know it’s not working,” said Carol Tobias, the president of the National Right to Life Committee.

Just as longtime activists and historians of the abortion movement cannot cite a moment when pro-choice became advocates’ preferred label, current leaders of women’s organizations cannot pinpoint when it began losing popularity. It has been gradual, they say, prompted by politics and poll findings back to 2010, the year President Obama’s Affordable Care Act became law and Republicans subsequently made gains in Congress and state capitals. Since then Republicans have spent a good deal of energy attacking the law, its birth control mandate, Planned Parenthood and Democrats’ economic agenda for women.

The change “is something that we have been talking about for several years,” said Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “I just think the ‘pro-choice’ language doesn’t really resonate particularly with a lot of young women voters. We’re really trying to focus on, what are the real things you’re going to lose? Sometimes that’s rights. Sometimes that’s economic or access to health care for you or for your kids.”

Pro-choice became commonplace after the 1973 Roe ruling, to counter the pro-life label of the anti-abortion movement. The description was seen as having broader appeal than “pro-abortion,” since it fit those who were personally against abortion but opposed any government control over women’s health decisions.

“ ‘Choice’ has been extraordinarily successful as a frame for the abortion-rights side because a lot of Americans may not like the idea of abortion but they definitely agree with the idea of choice,” said Suzanne Staggenborg, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who researches social movements. “And they agree that it should be a woman’s choice in consultation with her doctor.”

But by 2010 some abortion-rights activists began to sense in their outreach to young women, whose support was needed not only for the midterm elections but for the movement’s future as well, that the term pro-choice was virtually meaningless. That was confirmed by postelection polls and focus groups that women’s organizations and Democrats commissioned to understand what went wrong.

Among the findings, according to several people familiar with them: Many young women, when asked whether they were pro-choice or pro-life, said pro-life. Yet they supported the Roe ruling. Explaining the contradiction, Ms. Laguens said these self-described pro-life voters were “talking about their personal decision-making, for themselves, and not about what they want to push on others.”

But such results also showed the weakness of the pro-choice label, advocates and pollsters said. Planned Parenthood took the lead, conducting research on public attitudes throughout 2011 and then presenting the findings to allies in various meetings.

“It definitely was a bit destabilizing when we started,” Ms. Laguens said. When Planned Parenthood produced a YouTube video last year for supporters on the shift to a broader message, one member wrote online: “I’m pro-choice and I won’t be bullied into saying anything different. This is nothing but a retreat and a shame!”

Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York, who for 15 years has been a co-chairwoman of the Pro-Choice Caucus in Congress, scoffed at the idea of a name change. “I’ve never worried about it,” she said.

Emily’s List, a political fund-raising organization formed three decades ago to back female candidates who support abortion rights, still says on its website’s home page, “We ignite change by getting pro-choice Democratic women elected to office.” But its research arm, American Women, like Planned Parenthood, has also done extensive polling and recently produced a “tool kit” for candidates and activists — customized for each state — of economic policies for women, including paid leave, higher minimum wage, equal pay for women and men for equivalent work, and birth control coverage. (“Birth control is only a social issue if you’ve never had to pay for it,” advocates often say, to highlight the economic angle.)

The broadened message from women’s groups coincided with — and, they say, was hastened by — Republicans’ actions after taking control of the House and some state legislatures in the 2010 elections. Congressional Republicans sought to defund Planned Parenthood, threatening a government shutdown. Then they began their campaign to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which includes specific benefits for women — mandated coverage of contraception, mammograms and annual gynecological exams without co-payments; an end to an insurance industry rating system that charged women more than men, and a ban on insurers refusing to cover people with pre-existing conditions.

Republicans singled out the birth control benefit of the Affordable Care Act as a violation of employers’ religious freedom. They proposed “personhood” amendments defining life as starting at conception, which would criminalize not only abortion but also some fertility treatments. And they blocked economic proposals like equal pay.

“When you really look at the broad scope of all the Republicans’ attacks,” said Marcy Stech, a spokeswoman for Emily’s List, “it’s clear ‘women’s health’ is what’s at stake.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Advocates Shun ‘Pro-Choice’ to Expand Message. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe